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2024-02-16 14:16:18

OctaviaConAmore@cutie.city

Calling all musicians, illustrators, writers, and artists of any other medium :shiba_excited:

Alt-text is really useful, even for fully sighted people, but it's kind of bothersome, right? Just don't want to bother, yeah? :zerotwo_shrug:

Thing is, a lot of us don't boost media that lacks alt text. So, alt-text = your art is able to spread further = more income.

Alt text = more money for you :frog_blush:

(Seriously, I want to boost your awesome art and it's torture not being able to because it lacks alt text :frog_please: )

p s. I think people are missing the fact that helping visually impaired people by writing alt-text gets you more boosts, more followers, and more money? :shiba_confused:

#Art #MastoArt #Music #Writing #FediTips #AltText

show all 9 comments

2024-02-16 14:36:37

Mike Torr

miketorr@mastodon.art

@OctaviaConAmore One of the things I do is write (though I'm mainly focused on music at the moment). I regard creating alt text as writing practice! It's a great opportunity to hone my craft, aiming for concision and poetic description. Any writer who doesn't bother with it is missing out.

2024-02-16 14:40:27

Octavia con Amore :pink_moon_and_stars:

OctaviaConAmore@cutie.city

@miketorr Saaame :shiba_love: Getting a good explanation in while being concise and maybe even a little funny or witty is sometimes frustrating but good exercise :frog_blush:

2024-02-17 11:27:38

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Octavia con Amore :pink_moon_and_stars: Asking as someone who already writes image descriptions that exceed anything known to Mastodon by titanic magnitudes:

What would be sufficient alt-text for music? A detailed description of every bit of sound in that piece of music, interspersed with lyrics and a description of the sung melody, time-coded in both milliseconds and bars?

#AltText #MediaDescription #MediaDescriptions #Accessibility #A11y #Music

2024-02-17 11:36:38

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Octavia con Amore :pink_moon_and_stars: I'm afraid I can't do that.

When I want to post pictures of my own, I regularly spend hours, sometimes more than 13 hours, describing one image, researching things, examining things, explaining things in the image, all only for one image. The result is tens of thousands of characters long and goes into the post text body itself. I can afford that, I'm on something that doesn't have any character limit.

And that is already concise; I just have to describe and explain a whole lot so that everyone understands the image, and the curiosity of both sighted and non-sighted users about a topic completely alien to them is satisfied.

I always also add a short description into the alt-text, one that doesn't explain anything and just describes the basics. Along with it goes a mention that a full, detailed, explanatory image description can be found in the post above the image behind the long-post content warning if you're on Mastodon or in the same post right below the image if you're on Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams). This alt-text regularly goes beyond 800 characters itself.

Making any of this funny or witty would only be unnecessary natter and unnecessarily inflate something that's already excessively long by Mastodon's standards.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

2024-02-17 20:28:47

Octavia con Amore :pink_moon_and_stars:

OctaviaConAmore@cutie.city

@jupiter_rowland Wait, are you serious? :blobfox_confused:

A single sentence saying whith title, composer, and the album it was released as part of (in my case, what game/game/anime soundtrack it was a part of is fine :giggle:

Alt-text is there to help people that have hearing but struggle with sight. They can hear the music just fine :zerotwo_excited:

2024-02-17 22:30:36

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Octavia con Amore :pink_moon_and_stars: I'm serious in everything.

When I said I write extremely long image description, I was absolutely serious.

And just like visuals need to be described for non-sighted people, audio needs to be described for people without or with impaired hearing. At least, pure spoken word audio needs verbatim transcripts. But I'm pretty sure there are people in the Fediverse who demand written descriptions for all audio in the Fediverse.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Transcript #Transcripts #MediaDescription #MediaDescriptions #Accessibility #A11y

2024-02-17 22:34:40

Octavia con Amore :pink_moon_and_stars:

OctaviaConAmore@cutie.city

@jupiter_rowland Putting transcripts like that in alt-text seems a bit self-defeating, though. The point of alt-text in a social setting is to give people with screen-readers a manageable bite of text to figure out what the picture is. Full transcripts or 10k-character descriptions are nice, but putting them as a link in the body with the alt-text as a short summary) is probably the most convenient for people (anyone using a screen-reader, please correct me if I'm wrong here)

As for music, like I said, if they can hear a screen reader, they can hear the music :giggle:

2024-02-17 23:11:23

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Octavia con Amore :pink_moon_and_stars: Such transcripts don't go into alt-text. I mean, into the alt-text of what should they even go?

They go into the post itself, of course. At least I hope that there's enough room for that on Funkwhale and/or Castopod. And nobody would host a podcast on Mastodon which, except for Threads, is the only Fediverse project with a 500-character limit.

As for my image descriptions, as I've said, these monsters go into the post text body. Right where you have a 500-character limit, and I don't have any limit whatsoever at all. The three links in my previous comment should demonstrate how I do it.

It isn't very accessible to have blind or visually-impaired users open a separate webpage just to have an image described, especially if they're on a phone, and they have the post with the image in one app (their Mastodon app) and the description in another (their browser). It's always best to have the image and the description in the same place.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Transcript #Transcripts #MediaDescription #MediaDescriptions #Accessibility #A11y

2024-02-17 23:20:52

Octavia con Amore :pink_moon_and_stars:

OctaviaConAmore@cutie.city

@jupiter_rowland 500? Me? I don't know how much of my profile you've seen, but cutie.city operates on an 8k char limit, and I'm sure if I frequently went above it, we could have it shifted up again just like when we moved it from 4k to 8k :zerotwo_shrug:

As for Mastodon instances that, for some asinine reason, *insist* on keeping 500 chars, yeah, I'm sure that gets rather intersting to fit lol

And yeah, I can see how having it in the body of a post instead of linked to a webpage would be better for accessibility.